


Dia and Mari's Horrible Holiday Holdover

by kamote



Category: Love Live! Sunshine!!
Genre: Christmas fic, Established Relationship, F/F, it's late bc i ran out of steam but here's the first half, now with gk interactions and B pair yohamaru, secret hidden alt title: DiaMari's HoHoHo, technically its set from christmas eve to new year's eve, that magical last week of the year
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-20 15:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9498347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamote/pseuds/kamote
Summary: A mistletoe kiss goes wrong on Dia and Mari's first Christmas Eve together since the drama from two years ago. They each go, "It's not you, it's me," but like, just individually and internally, before resolving to patch things up by New Year's.But can they? Is there a point to this drama? Whoisit?





	1. Christmas Eve: the Holly-Nay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was going to be just one big oneshot but i wasnt and am still not sure if i can finish it but also i wanted to share what i did get done so i divided it into 4 tiny little parts (as of this writing, 2.7/4 parts done).   
> also, disclaimer, i have no firsthand romantic experience whatsoever but im trying my best (on that note, i am adjusting for what i know of dating culture in japan being much more subtle and slower? than west standards, especially when it's gfs, but again idk much; feedback/corrections on portrayal is welcome)
> 
> italics will mean one of four things on a case-to-case basis: 1) it's language-specific dialogue and said verbatim as opposed to 'they're speaking in japanese but the fic is in english', 2) it's thinking text, 3) it's emphasis, or 4) it's kanan on the phone.

When Dia saw the mistletoe hanging over hers and Mari’s heads, it was everything else in her surroundings that flooded her senses.

Distant holiday music and laughter beneath the balcony.

Warm lights dotting the scene beneath them and reaching the heights of the trees and beyond.

The soft golden glow casting mesmeric shadows over Mari’s face, tinged red by the cold.

Mari’s eyes, following Dia’s to the innocuous little shrub above them, and how they blinked and looked back to her Dia’s after the spark of realization lit them up for just an instant.

One by one all those little details and images fell under Dia’s attention only to meld together until she stood with Mari knowing only three things.

First, that somewhere in her trance her hands had gone and found warmth in Mari’s.

Second, that Mari tonight, dressed in another snow-white ensemble for the events today for both shadow and warm Christmas light to caress her as they did, was nothing short of stunning.

Third, that she seemed not to have quashed the romantic in her even after all these years.

Dia’s heartbeat picked up, uncomfortably and disgracefully so. She and Mari still haven’t looked away from each other. Time had slowed into a painful crawl, and her rational mind had stopped functioning altogether.

Her eyes closed slowly, and her face inched forward, steadily, cautiously, as confidently as she could make it while her lips parted just slightly, tensed in waiting.

She thought the drum of her heart seemed deafening, but it wasn't.

“It’s holly, you know.”

Dia fell back to earth with a shock. She tried to answer, but her words couldn’t return to her fast enough.

“The little plant above us is holly,” Mari said. Dia didn’t know how to feel about the cheer in her voice or how typical it was. “I thought you might like to know, since you get all persnickety about these kinds of things sometimes.”

A short moment of silence passed and suffocated Dia a little. She glanced at Mari’s smiling face, then to the offending piece of décor above them . “O-Of course,” she said, her voice just a notch hoarser than she preferred. “Goodness. I suppose that as a close call. It wouldn’t quite have been tradition if I had…”

Kissed you. Just say it, Dia. If you kissed her.

She couldn’t.

“Hey, no problemo now,” Mari said, squeezing Dia’s hand. “A lot of people mistake holly for mistletoe when Christmastime comes round. Wouldn’t want you getting glum over kissing me under some other shrub, like an uninformed commoner. Totally not a Dia thing to do.”

“Absolutely,” Dia said. Her voice already felt stilted, and she dreaded to think about how it might’ve sounded. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

“Of course!” Mari smiled. It was toothy and infectious. “How could I be the best girlfriend ever if I didn’t even do that much?”

Then, at least, the chuckle that rose up Dia’s throat was light and genuine, but as the evening continued, the thought of that moment ate and ate away at her spirits.

Her Christmas Eve with Mari ended early.


	2. Dia Reflects

“Because you chickened out?”

Dia lowered her teacup and shot Kanan a look that was five degrees short of a searing glare. “I maintain that I did not ‘chicken out’ of the situation that evening,” she said. “Rather, you could say that I was… discouraged.”

Kanan hummed and took a bite of her colorful tree-shaped Christmas cookie. “’Splain.”

“You must know that I tried to take action,” Dia began. “It must have been painfully obvious what my intentions were, and Mari-san, for all her nonsense, is the farthest from thickheaded and oblivious that anyone in Aqours—in the student body, even—may be. So when she stops my obvious advances with claims that I as Dia Kurosawa would never do something as indecorous as… kissing her, under holly and not mistletoe as in historical tradition, it must be presumed that she was acting under pretenses and did not actually mean what she said!”

A few seconds, filled only with the sound of muffled crunching and Dia’s heavy, agitated breathing, passed before Kanan responded.

“So… mm, you think Mari is kinda trying to let you down softly from trying to kiss her or something?”

“…Yes.” Dia stamped away the urge to go on about how it had to be this, of all things, that Mari chose to be delicate with. The short, monosyllabic answer she provided would have to suffice, even if it really didn’t.

“Well don’t you think she might’ve, you know, just been telling the truth?” Kanan said with a slanted sort of shrug. “I mean, you did agree with her on the holly-mistletoe thing, so you gotta figure her point was real.”

“Still,” Dia said, “even for the rest of the evening, Mari-san never brought it up again. Tell me, does she seem like the type to shy away from displays of affection that she wants to carry out?”

“Nope.”

“Precisely. She did not ask to; ergo, she must not have wanted to. Perhaps slightly over a month's time may seem a little early for some to attempt this particular gesture, but you would think that knowing her for ten years prior would allow some room to quicken the progression of our relationship.”

“Haste makes waste, _desu wa,”_ Kanan said. “Nothing wrong with taking things slow and going with the flow. Have a cookie with your tea and relax for a bit—you’re so worked up your face is a little red.”

Kanan pushed the bowl of colorful and variously-shaped holiday cookies toward Dia. Dia recalled they were from Mari. She frowned at them. “This is almost entirely sugar. Why are you eating so much of it?”

“They’re good and I like to enjoy the season? We all have to loosen up sometimes.” Kanan popped the last of her very green tree-shaped cookie into her mouth.

“I can’t loosen up with last night _haunting_ me like this.”

As she chewed, Kanan gave Dia another noncommittal hum and a nod—a little gesture of acknowledgement if anything, and for the short stretch of time between Kanan swallowing the cookie and reaching for the next tree to eat, Dia assumed she was assembling an answer.

Kanan got her cookie and graciously chose to speak before taking another bite. “Well, if you’re so eager to move forward with your relationship with Mari, why didn’t you ask her instead?”

Dia quickly raised her finger, opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again to say, “Why _didn’t_ I?”

“Right?” Kanan said. “If this was two years ago or something I’d understand, but since then you’ve honestly gotten way more forward with your thoughts and feelings. Like, Mari told me you pulled her by the tie the first day she got back, and _you_ were in _her_ office.”

“As if I knew that at the time!” Dia said.

But it got her thinking. She never did tell Kanan about it all, but the holiday season of two years ago was the first since elementary school that she spent apart from Mari, and as a memory it was heavy and melancholy. She hadn’t ever expected to have to tell Ruby why they wouldn’t be visiting the Ohara family hotels that year when it was almost yearly tradition by then, and she found that remaining at her own home for Christmas Eve, even with family and friends and the usual guests, was downright depressing when she thought about why she was there. Her conscience, which for months nagged at her saying ‘Why didn’t you tell her you wanted her to stay?’ had only gotten louder in the night between then and New Year’s Eve.

More so than even others who were born on the first of January, Dia always, always, _always_ aimed high and made good on her resolutions—it was why she was as good as she was. On her seventeenth birthday, Dia found no better course of action than to resolve to be stand up for herself and become stronger as a person, to stop hiding behind others, to speak her damn mind and say what she had to so she wouldn’t regret dithering again. She fought and changed as she wanted, and in the middle of the year when Mari finally opened contact with her again all the way from her own home overseas, she got to impress her with the news that she was everyone’s first choice as the next student council president.

She made her progress and changed, and by her third year, by the time Mari made her shocking return and the new Aqours surfaced and all the issues from the past were hugged out and ready to heal, she was stronger than before and unbound by things like appearances or childish weakness. Aqours moved forward, one day she confessed to Mari and sooner than she even knew it was Christmas Eve at the Ohara’s place again, where they were standing under _holly,_ not mistletoe, and the old familiar devil of timid silence reared its ugly head and coiled around her for as long as it mattered.

If she was anyone else, it would be fine and she could just wait calmly for the next chick flick-worthy romantic atmosphere to fall upon them and kiss Mari for the first time as a girlfriend then and there. But she was Dia Kurosawa, Slayer of Fear, and she _would_ wait for that atmosphere, but not without dying of regret inside and proceeding to roll in her soul-grave for the next few days.

Mari made her shy again, it was true, but missing a kiss and having reason to doubt Mari’s feelings didn’t mean the end of their relationship. It didn’t even mean the end of the world. There was always next time. New Year’s. A kiss under the fireworks would probably be more fitting for Mari, anyway.

 _That’s the plan,_ Dia thought. She’d wait and see on New Year’s Eve, ask for a kiss for her birthday or anything necessarily bold, and then she’d get her kiss, or at least a solid read on Mari’s thoughts on where they should be in their relationship. Solid.

Kanan spoke. “You’re not planning on falling asleep there, right? Your whole teapot’s going to get cold.”

Dia ended her reflection, pulled the pillow off her face and took in the view of her house from where she lay on the floor. “God I’m weak.”


	3. Mari Also Reflects, Elsewhere

“God I’m weak.”

Yoshiko’s voice was muffled since her face was pressed on the wood on Mari’s coffee table, but the aura of defeat oozed from every phoneme.

“No you’re not,” Riko said.

“Oh Lucifer in Hell I am so weak,” Yoshiko said. “Not even Yohane was strong enough in the face of her brilliance… Now I really _will_ have to spend New Year’s with my family.”

“Is that really such a bad thing?”

“No, they’re alright, but my soul will burn quietly the whole time because I’ll be thinking about being with her instead. This is so unbecoming of a fallen angel.”

“Yocchan…”

“It’s fine. Leave me to my sorrow.”

Somehow Yoshiko’s entire being slumped down into the furniture even more than before. Riko sighed.

“What happened with Yohane-chan?” Mari asked, stirring her coffee.

“She’s just reeling over the fact that she couldn’t find the guts to ask Hanamaru-chan out for New Year’s Day,” Riko said.

“Aw, poor thing!” Mari reached over and patted Yoshiko’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Maru-chan’s not going to lose interest in you anytime soon.”

“Yeah,” Yoshiko mumbled, “as if she’s interested _like that.”_

“You’re more charming than you think, Yohane-chan,” Mari said. “ _Don’t give up!_ ”

Yoshiko groaned, and Riko shifted her eyes from her to Mari. “How about you, then, Mari-san?” she asked. “Did you do any better last night with Dia-san?”

“Well, I don’t know if I should be so blunt about it around Yohane-chan—“

“I’ll be _fine.”_

“—but we’re already _doing_ better, as an official item, so I’d say _we_ did.”

Riko’s brow furrowed. “I take it then that, as an official item that’s doing so well, you’ve shared your first kiss as planned?”

Mari smiled up to her eyes at Riko, raised her ornate porcelain coffee cup, and took a sip. A long sip. A long, dainty, serene sip of positively delectable afternoon coffee.

“You didn’t, did you?”

Mari put her cup down and—

“Did even you go with that ridiculous holly plan?”

“It was not ridiculous!” Mari said. “You can’t say it’s ridiculous if it worked!”

Riko made a face like she had a terrible migraine and her eye was itching a little. “It worked,” Riko said, “meaning Dia-san did try to kiss you, and you backed out with the holly story.”

“Wow,” Yoshiko piped in. “I can’t believe Mari-san chickened out of a kiss. Weren’t you supposed to be the saucy one?”

“I’m plenty saucy!”

“Yeah, saucy clucking chicken, maybe.”

With a huff, Mari crossed her arms and stuck her tongue out at her rude company. “Some unit-mates you two are. No _confidence_ in me!”

“We _are confident_ in you,” Riko said. “Or, we _were,_ that you’d go through with kissing Dia-san this Christmas Eve, as you’d been saying you would for the past week. You wanted to, didn’t you?”

“Yes it’s true, I wanted smooches from my precious Dia… but also I didn’t.”

“So you didn’t want to more than you did?”

“No, not that either, definitely not.”

Riko made another sour-ish face that looked vaguely accusatory, so Mari took her coffee cup and its platter and leaned back on her armchair.

“Listen, sweet Riko and Yohane, little ducklings, these are complicated feelings. When you get older and have nice girlfriends of your own, likely then you’ll understand my terrible _fear_ in this romantic situation.”

_“Fear?”_ Yoshiko said, curiosity piqued.

“Yes, _fear,”_ Mari said. “Guilty Kiss throws them around little liberally to suit our flirty, spicy, stylish image, but gestures like kissing have a lot of meaning in them, you know. When it comes to serious, honest, uppity people like Dia, bumping us up from hand-holders and huggers to disgusting holiday smoochers also means we’re like, closer in heart and soul. Something about entrusting our feelings to each other or whatever, you know?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Riko said. “You two know each other well enough to handle it.”

“Bzzt-bzzt!” Mari did an imposing sort of forward motion. “Have you _seen_ how Dia and I act around each other?”

“How?” Yoshiko said. “Like, married? Disgusting? _Loud?_ ”

“ _Right?”_ Mari said. “Where’s our sweet romantic subtlety? _Missing!_ It took me weeks just to hold her hand, and I’m the one who jumped her at first sight!”

Thinking her point was made and ready for judgement, Mari stopped there, but Riko and Yoshiko just traded looks of skepticism in silence. A few heartbeats in, Mari’s face started heating up inconceivably.

“Um. It was just a few weeks, right?”

“ _Just_ a few weeks?” Yoshiko shot Mari a crooked, toothy smirk, reached for her phone and began to tap away. “Do you remember your stupid mall dates?”

“Yes?” They were the earliest dates between them, if Mari would remember correctly. The first was on the Saturday of the week they confessed to each other, and despite it, they wound up buying more things for Kanan together than for either of them. Mari had a blast, and Dia seemed to as well after she got used to five-digit prices turning into the average.

Soon, Yoshiko finished whatever it was she was looking for on her phone. “Do you remember doing this?”

Pictures. Mari gasped.

A few of them had Yoshiko in wide shades and a face mask in the corner of the foreground, but the unmistakable subject of all the pictures she showed Mari was how publicly affectionate she was being toward Dia. Here, she was pulling Dia somewhere by the hand, and on the next she seemed to be scouting for more stores to attack while locking Dia’s arm in hers. On the next their fingers were interlaced together, and then it was arms in a lock again, and so on until the last, where it looked like Mari had fallen asleep on Dia’s shoulder while waiting on a bench for their train to arrive.

All in all there were just about a dozen pictures of them over the course of, what, four dates? Mari thought it was four.

“Yohane-chan, you’re not Dia’s stalker, are you?”

“No way on Earth,” Yoshiko said. “I took these pictures for Ruby, and I only took them if I happened to see you around, which was pretty often in a mall as tiny as that one. But more importantly, look at you! I know you can’t keep your hands off Dia, but come on!”

Mari reviewed the pictures again. Photographic evidence was right there, but she had no memory of consciously doing any of _those_ things.

“These… are different.”

Yoshiko’s jaw dropped. “Buh-what?”

“They’re different!” Mari said with a shrug. “I’m not sure how to explain it, but these things I did aren’t the same as the thing I didn’t do on Christmas Eve.”

“What? How?” Yoshiko said.

“They’re not exactly romantic,” Riko supplied helpfully, raised index finger and all.

Yoshiko looked at Riko with the expression of someone clearly expecting more, and Mari went back to her coffee, dreading it.

“I think I know what the problem is,” Riko finally said, folding her legs in an elegant cross. “You really are that affectionate to Dia-san, but only when you don’t think about it. Once it’s the two of you alone in an intimate atmosphere, you get too self-conscious to let yourself do anything like that since it’s not your usual kind of expression, and then you choke. Make sense?”

Riko’s conclusion left Mari dumbstruck, and Mari could only place her china down in defeat and stare at an empty space on the table. Her suspicions had been there, but she’d been doing so well since being abroad…

Mari’s own phone buzzed loudly in her pocket. She welcomed the distraction and answered right away. “ _Hello, it’s Mari!”_

_“Hey, Mari,”_ Kanan said. “ _Thought you’d like to know that I was at Dia’s house just earlier._ ”

_“Oh, my Dia!”_ Mari paused almost imperceptibly, which was too long. _“_ How was she?”

_“Excitable as always,”_ Kanan said, her smile seeping into her voice. _“We had your cookies and talked a little, but also she told me to ask you something after I got five minutes away.”_

What an oddly specific request—very Dia-like. “What’s up?”

_“We were wondering if you were interested in celebrating New Year’s at the Kurosawa’s place with the rest of Aqours instead of the usual.”_

“Is that an invitation or is she asking _me_ for permission to use _her_ house?”

_“Uhh, a little of both I guess?"_

“Oh, well, I’m not sure, I’ve never been entrusted with someone else’s property without paying for it like this. Gimme a minute to refer to my consultants.” Mari lowered her phone. “Hey guys do you want Aqours to party at the Kurosawa’s place for New Year’s?”

Yoshiko all but leaped out of her seat. “By the nine hells, _yes!_ Is it Dia on the phone? Tell her I love her for me.”

Mari returned to her phone. “Hey Maru, Yohane-chan says she loves you.”

“Wait, what—“

_“Be nice to her, Mari,”_ Kanan said. _“Anyway, that’s a yes from you guys. I’ll run the idea by Chika-chan and company and see about a majority vote.”_

“Yep, yep,” Mari said, “but before you hang up, what was up with that? Why did she ask you to ask me like this? Usually she doesn’t have any trouble getting in people’s faces.”

Kanan hummed, but it sounded more like hesitation than her pondering the answer. _“Can’t say I know. If I had to guess, it looks like it might be because she didn’t want the chance to change her mind.”_

“Huh…” Mari rolled those words over in her head. They hooked onto her thought, but she couldn’t place why.

_“Yeah. I can’t speak for her, though, so you should ask Dia herself when you get the chance. Anyway, I found Chika-chan and the others, so I gotta go. See ya later!”_

Beep. Kanan hangs up, and Mari puts her phone down.

“She didn’t want my opinion?” Riko asked.

“You always go with what we say, anyway,” Yoshiko said. “More importantly, that wasn’t really Zuramaru, was it?”

“No, it was Kanan,” Riko said. “Hanamaru-chan went with CYaRon today, remember?”

“Ahh, right.” Again, Yoshiko began to deflate.

“Hey now, Yocchan, don’t get discouraged. You, too, Mari-san—you’re spacing out again.”

Mari blinked out of her trance. _“What?”_

Riko sighed through her nose. “Look, we’re all going to see each other again in a few days, right? Maybe you should think of this as a chance to make up for Christmas Eve. You guys have a until the weekend to prepare however you have to—clear your head, cook up some pick-up lines, summon a demon, whatever, just don’t spend them... like that.”

She had her point, not that Mari was the type to mope for extended periods of time. On the contrary, she was the type for action and solid plans, and plan she would for something so momentous. New Year’s was Dia’s day, but she wouldn’t need anything elaborate like the holly plan this time. She just needed something clever.

And if there was one thing that Mari Ohara was, she was clever.


End file.
